This section describes approaches that could be employed, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or employed. Hence, unless explicitly specified otherwise, any approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application, and any approaches described in this section are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Existing routing systems (such as those providing access to the Internet) typically are deployed based on pre-configuring network devices to follow a prescribed routing protocol, enabling the network devices to forward an object according to the specific routing protocol deployed within the routing system. For example, propagation of an IPv4 data packet inherently requires initiation (i.e., generation) of the IPv4 data packet within an IPv4 data network by an IPv4-configured network device, forwarding the IPv4 data packet by one or more IPv4-configured devices (e.g., IPv4 routers), and terminating propagation of the IPv4 data packet by an IPv4-configured destination device. Attempts to translate from a first routing protocol (e.g., IPv4/RIP) to a second different routing protocol (e.g., IPv6/OSPF) requires a network device to be pre-configured to not only recognize both protocols, but requires the network device to be pre-configured to translate from the first protocol to the second protocol (e.g., an IPv4/IPv6 gateway); alternately, the network device must be pre-configured to encapsulate the first-protocol data packet (e.g., an IPv4 data packet) within the second-protocol data packet (e.g., an IPv6 data packet) for transmission via the second routing system according to the second different routing protocol.
Hence, translation to different routing protocols is limited to a network device being pre-configured to the specific routing protocols in use.